Bush Administration Was Afraid It Would Have To Admit Telcos Helped With Warrantless Wiretaps To Get Immunity

from the why-would-they-want-immunity-otherwise dept

With the EFF finally successful in getting the federal gov't to hand over some lobbying documents involved in the process of granting telcos total immunity in lawsuits over warrantless wiretapping, the press is starting to go through the documents. Wired digs in and finds that the Bush administration was worried it would have to admit that the telcos had actually broken the law in order to get immunity -- but were able to route around that by having the Attorney General "submit a certification to the district court that the carrier defendant either did not provide the assistance as alleged, or did so in connection with a counter-terrorism program authorized by the president and pursuant to written assurances of legality." In other words, by doing a "this" OR "that," they could claim some sort of plausible deniability for the gullible.

Of course, the whole thing is silly. Why would the telcos need immunity if they hadn't broken the law? The only reason to push for immunity was because they obviously had broken the law. The entire push for immunity was never really about protecting the telcos, but about protecting the federal government from having to admit that it clearly broke the law as stated concerning oversight of wiretaps.

The other interesting element in the Wired report is that the Bush administration was worried that future administrations would reverse the immunity -- something it doesn't seem to have to worry about considering that the Obama administration has happily continued to hold the same position on warrantless wiretaps. However, the administration was unable to get anything put in the bill that would prevent future administrations from changing the immunity -- so, perhaps there's still some hope.

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Administration Succeeds In Delaying The Release Of Telco Lobbying On Immunity

from the transparency-is-good-in-theory... dept

So much for that new Obama administration "transparency" claim, huh? After three unsuccessful attempts at stalling a court order to release documents concerning who lobbied for telco immunity in warrantless wiretapping lawsuits, the administration has succeeded in its fourth attempt, delaying the release of the documents at least until next year. Of course, by the time this is decided, it should be long after Congress is done debating the whole warrantless wiretapping issue... so that's convenient. I'm still trying to figure out who or what the administration is trying to shield. It seems pretty obvious that the telcos would lobby for immunity, so that's not revealing much. So what's so important to keep secret?

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Obama Administration: Shield Law Should Only Protect Journalists If We Don't Care About The Story

from the um...-wait-a-second... dept

We already found it quite troubling that the Senate committee, working on a federal "shield law" that would help protect journalists from having to reveal their sources, switched from language that was pretty inclusive, to a bill that would greatly limit the definition of a journalist to only those who work for big time journalistic endeavors. Lots of smaller, independent or amateur journalists would get no protection at all. Sen. Chuck Schumer, a sponsor of the bill, was apparently responsible for kicking out all those independent journalists. In looking into why, Jason Linkins, was told that the Justice Department was apparently worried that everyone would just start claiming shield protection, and it would greatly limit their ability to investigate certain issues. That's a stretch, however. The law clearly could have been written in a way that would enable investigations, without removing protections over legitimate journalistic activity.

Either way, it might not matter at all. Apparently, even after all this, the Obama administration is asking for more concessions, such as not allowing any shield protection on any instance where the administration declares that the matter involves "significant" harm to national security. Now, you can understand why the administration would want that, but there's absolutely no oversight. Basically, under the administration's proposal, if the administration simply said there was such harm, the judge would immediately wipe out the shield.

If you want to create a chilling effect against any sort of whistleblowing on gov't corruption, that's what this proposal does. It basically lets the gov't say that the shield law only applies to whistleblowing that doesn't make the administration look bad. But, in any case where the administration isn't happy, it gets to wipe out the shield. Apparently, freedom of the press only applies to situations in which the administration is not embarrassed.

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Why Is The Administration Fighting Transparency On TARP?

from the this-is-not-good dept

We haven't written that much about the economy lately, as others seem to be doing a great job on it, but back when the TARP program first came about, we were quite concerned with the nature of the program, and specifically the lack of transparency. With the change in administrations -- especially to one that insisted transparency was a key factor, we hoped that things would get better. Now, it's no secret that we've been upset about some of the new administration's failure to live up to its own transparency promises. But there had been some evidence lately that it really was becoming increasingly transparent with how some taxpayer funds are being spent.

Apparently, that doesn't apply to the bailout, though.

Here's a disturbing story about the guy who's in responsible for being the independent watchdog over how the TARP money is being spent. While he's a long-term Democrat and Obama supporter (so his views aren't political), he's been quite critical of how the administration is not being at all transparent concerning how TARP is being used. He wanted the administration to force the banks to explain what they were doing -- and was told that was impossible. So he did it himself -- and asked the banks to let him know how the funds were being used, which they did. He used that and some other info to put out a report, suggesting that the funds aren't being used as was expected. That sounds exactly like what the independent watchdog should be doing.

But the administration (mainly the Treasury Department) has been fighting him, and is now trying to have it declared that the independent watchdog actually is under the control of the Treasury Department -- which would basically take away the whole "independent" part. That seems to go against the very concept of the transparency we were promised. It's great that this guy and his very small team of folks are actually monitoring what's happening with our taxpayer money (whether you agree with how it was used or not). It's not a good sign that the Obama administration is now trying to muzzle him. That's not transparency people can believe in.

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Disappointing: Obama Administration Won't Support Treaty For Helping Blind Get Digital Books

from the shame dept

JJ points us to an unfortunate story that the Obama administration appears to be siding against an intellectual property treaty agreement that would have helped blind and visually impaired individuals by allowing "the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type." As the article notes, exceptions to copyright law for the production of books for the blind is common, and effectively this would expand that to ebooks. Many had hoped that the administration would support it... but:

Assurances coming into the negotiations this week that things were going in the right direction have turned out to be false, as the United States delegation has basically read from a script written by lobbyists for publishers, extolling the virtues of market based solutions, ignoring mountains of evidence of a "book famine" and the insane legal barriers to share works.

It continues to be a massive disappointment that politicians keep bowing down to corporate pressure when it clearly goes against the very purpose of copyright law.

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Obama Administration Sides With Technology Over Hollywood In Cablevision Case

from the finally! dept

It's no secret that those of us who have been in favor of pushing back against the worst abuses of intellectual property law have been disappointed by the Obama administration -- which brought in a number of entertainment industry lawyers and seemed to side with IP holders over the public at almost every turn... until now. We've talked about the importance of the lawsuit over Cablevision's remote DVR system, and whether it represented copyright infringement. The appeals court had ruled that just because the DVR was hosted at Cablevision's datacenter instead of in a house it wasn't infringement. This makes perfect sense. Yet the entertainment industry has been claiming that allowing Cablevision to host DVRs on its own premise is infringement and Cablevision has to pay extra for the right to offer the same exact TiVo-type service that anyone can use in their home. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked the new Solicitor General to weigh in. At the time, we noted that this could be a good thing, since one of the last things Solicitor General Elena Kagan did before leaving Harvard to join the administration was recruit Larry Lessig to Harvard.

And, indeed, it appears that Kagan has not succumbed to entertainment industry's tortured logic on this issue and has recommended that the Supreme Court not take the case, saying that the appeals court ruling reasonably resolved the issues in the case. Either way, it's nice to see that the administration hasn't been totally taken over by those who believe in twisting copyright law to protect obsolete business models.

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Judge Slams Administration For Ignoring Orders In Warrantless Wiretapping Case

from the new-administration,-same-story dept

We've covered the Al-Haramain case for a while, as it's the one case where there's actual evidence of a party being the subject of warrantless wiretaps by the administration. So far, the judge has continued to allow the case to go forward despite objections from both the previous administration and the current one. On Friday, the judge in the case got angry enough to scold the administration for failing to obey court orders related to the case and continuing to make arguments that had already been rejected. As such, the judge appears to be considering a sanction prohibiting the government from opposing liability for such warrantless wiretaps. This whole situation continues to baffle me. There's absolutely no reason why the federal government should need a warrantless wiretap, unless it knows that it has no probable cause and simply wants to spy on people for the sake of spying. If it had a real reason to wiretap, it could get a warrant. If it was urgent, wiretap laws have given the government a window to ask for a warrant immediately after setting up the wiretap. There's no reasonable explanation for denying the basic checks and balances to avoid abuse, and it's disappointing that both administrations have continued to try to avoid any discussion over the matter, and are improperly framing it as a matter of national security for which they don't need to answer.

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Where's That Line Between True Democracy And Mob Rule?

from the peopleocracy dept

Way back in 7th grade social studies class, I still remember one of the first assignments we had from Mr. Kemp (I think that was his name...) was to make a suggestion for a way to change or improve the way government functions. My suggestion was that in addition to the two legislative branches (the House of Representatives and the Senate), we could add a third branch for direct citizen voting on bills. I think I called it the Peoplocracy or something. Whenever it was time to vote on various bills, the information would be broadcast via TV, and individuals could call a phone number and "vote" one way or the other. I remember that I got a bad grade on the paper, as the teacher told me such an idea made no sense: our elected officials in Congress where there to represent the will of the people, and direct voting on bills by citizens was entirely redundant and unnecessary. To this day, I still feel the teacher dismissed the idea too quickly... but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea.

Since the election there have been a bunch of stories about how President-elect Obama has built up this huge direct line of communication to a huge, passionate and committed group of citizens and supporters via the internet, and there's plenty of speculation about how he intends to use that connection to help push his legislative agenda forward. In many ways, this is quite exciting, and I'm curious to see how it works -- and hoping for the best. After all, a huge problem with our elected officials in the past is that they were so far disconnected from the citizens they were supposed to represent that their policy choices were often backwards. Instead, it was often the powerful lobbyists who got through and were able to fashion laws to support their positions, rather than the overall well-being of the citizenry.

Anything that gives the actual people a bigger voice and a better ability to communicate and connect with the President or other elected officials seems like a great idea -- and we're already seeing some of that in action with the Obama's impressive Change.gov operation, which, among other things allows people to submit policy ideas and allows others to vote on them, in a Digg-like fashion. The possibilities for such a program are potentially limitless and incredibly powerful.

And yet... I'm still left wondering if there isn't a huge risk as well. As we've seen time and time again, powerful technologies don't discriminate. They can be used for very good purposes and they can be used for very bad purposes as well. I'm very excited about the good possibilities, but I'm wondering how much thought is being given to limiting the downside possibilities. There is, of course, the risk of "mob rule"-type decision making at times. While majority rules is the foundation of democracy, there are times when a simple majority can end up taking away the rights of a minority or put in place a dreadful and dangerous policy. This can happen especially after emotionally-charged incidents, where "mob rule" and thoughts of revenge or punishment overrule the rational parts of many people. Also, with any such system, there is the risk of gaming. As we've unfortunately seen with Digg over the past year or so, a small group of individuals have figured out how to effectively control the system, almost entirely stomping out the voices of others.

I don't think this is where things are headed, and I'm not saying that the technology or embracing a direct connection to people is a bad thing. I think just the opposite is true. I'm really excited to see where all of this leads, and the fact that there's at least some indication that we're not dealing with politics as usual is great. But... in seeing everyone talk up how wonderful this is, I worry about what's being done to at least guard against the worst abuses that occur when a direct connection to the people turns from rational into irrational mob rule out for blood.

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